The Army’s Nuclear Base Under Greenland Ice

In April 2024, NASA scientists flying over Greenland were testing radar equipment when the remains of a Cold War Army installation appeared beneath them.

“We were looking for the bed of the ice and out pops Camp Century,” Alex Gardner, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told NASA.

The abandoned base’s structures now sit at least 100 feet below the surface. The radar gave a different perspective of a place the Army once called home: a settlement carved into the ice, complete with living quarters and nuclear energy for the base.

The ambitions for the base went beyond the simple housing of soldiers in Greenland. It helped to test whether the Army could build something much larger and more complex: a concealed network capable of supporting up to 600 nuclear missiles that could strike the Soviet Union.

A Township Inside the Ice

Construction began in 1959. Army engineers excavated trenches, covered them with steel arches and snow, and installed prefabricated buildings inside.

Airspace around the buildings helped limit melting. The resulting settlement could accommodate roughly 200 soldiers. Its main passage, appropriately called “Main Street,” stretched more than 1,000 feet.

Getting supplies was a mission of its own. According to a study from 2016 that was published in Geophysical Research Letters, the Army supported Camp Century through hauling supplies across an over-snow trail that came directly from Thule Air Base, which is now known as Pituffik Space Base.

The camp was built 26 feet into the ice sheet’s upper layer of compacting snow. Soldiers lived inside the same snow that held the base up, which made the snow itself central to the experiment.

A Reactor Beneath The Snow

Power came from the Army’s PM-2A nuclear reactor. Installing it meant moving hundreds of tons of equipment into an environment where extreme cold could make metal brittle.

The reactor began operating in 1960 and ran for approximately 33 months before the Army deactivated and removed it, according to the Atomic Heritage Foundation.

Camp Century itself was publicly promoted. The Army produced a film showcasing its research community, and scientists conducted genuine investigations into Greenland’s ice.

The reactor and the missile proposal served their own purposes. The nuclear power components kept the installation operating, while Project Iceworm looked at the details of how an expanded version of that installation could support a potential nuclear weapons force.

Showing how personnel could live and work was just a step toward evaluating this larger ambition. The American Geophysical Union says that this camp was just a proof of concept for the nuclear missile deployment system.

The Bigger Plan: Project Iceworm

The Arctic offered an important strategic advantage during the Cold War: it provided the shortest route between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Project Iceworm envisioned approximately 2,500 miles of tunnels capable of supporting up to 600 nuclear missiles. U.S. officials kept the missile program secret from the Danish government, even though Denmark had approved Camp Century, according to the American Geophysical Union.

The key to the plan was concealment. Moving missiles through an extensive underground network could make their locations difficult for an adversary to target and track. Army planners hoped this would confuse the enemy enough to keep American retaliatory efforts alive.

Army engineers also installed an experimental railway beneath the snow as an early demonstration of the concept. In 1962, the Army proposed the project to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The proposed area of construction covered around 50,000 square miles in Greenland. Camp Century was just a small experiment compared with the base that the original engineers had in mind.

Ice Was A Problem

The environment ultimately undermined the idea. Greenland’s ice sheet moves and deforms. At Camp Century, that behavior threatened the tunnels that a much larger missile system would also depend on.

The Atomic Heritage Foundation identifies the unstable ice as the most important technical obstacle to Iceworm.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff rejected the proposal in 1963. Year-round operations at the base ended in 1964, while seasonal activity continued until the base was abandoned in 1967. The missiles were never deployed.

The test installation survived longer than the weapons proposal, but the Army left its infrastructure behind in a deteriorating tunnel network.

Materials The Army Left Behind

Abandonment rested on an assumption that accumulating snow would keep the site buried indefinitely.

Researchers later questioned that assumption. A 2016 study examined how warming could eventually expose infrastructure and waste, including diesel fuel, sewage, chemical contaminants and low-level radioactive material.

Its projections suggested the site could begin losing more surface snow and ice than it gained around 2090 under a high-emissions scenario. That was a possible transition toward eventual exposure, rather than a fixed date when the entire camp would emerge.

NASA’s 2024 imagery gave a clearer view of the buried structures. Earlier radar surveys had detected and shown the camp, but the newer instrument revealed individual features in much greater detail for viewers.

The scientists were trying to test ways to map ice sheets, not look for an Army base under the ice. The imagery brought back hidden secrets from a different age: a nuclear-powered settlement that was built to investigate whether the ice could conceal a much larger nuclear arsenal.